Correlation of hematological findings with severity of COVID-19

Abstract

SARS-COV-2 emerged as pneumonia of unknown etiology and transforming into global pandemic leading mass casualties globally. It leads to serious complications with a wide range of symptoms and laboratory and radiological abnormalities. Methodology: This retrospective study included 191 admitted patients was conducted between 15 April 2020 and 31 August 2020 at university of Lahore teaching hospital, Lahore, Pakistan. Baseline demographics, clinical, laboratory and radiological characteristics were compared amongst disease severity categories with One way ANOVA and comparison amongst recovered and non-recovered was carried out by independent t test, Fisher’s exact and chi-square test respectively. All data were analysed in SPSS 25 and p-value <0.05 was considered significant. Results: Out of 191 patients enrolled in this study, majority were male and above 50 year age. Fever (68%) was the most common symptom though dyspnea was statistically significant (p-value<0.05) and diabetes (41.4%) being the most common comorbidity. A statistical significant downtrend in eosinophil counts were observed in critical and severe disease from non-severe disease and similar trend was observed in non-recovered (died) patients than recovered. A significant rise in neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio, crp, ferritin and d-dimer were observed amongst critical and severe disease and non-recovered patients (p-value<0.05). Patients with eosinopenia had low survival proportion at day 5 and 10 than those with relatively normal eosinophil counts. Conclusion: Patients with advanced age, multiple comorbidities, elevated hematological, deranged coagulation markers presented with more severe disease and had poor outcome. In particular, eosinopenia can play key role in early diagnosis, disease severity recognition and disease surveillance as it is an independent risk factor for prognosis.